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The Good Judgement Project (for that was its name) is pretty awesome - but if you mechanically connected it to the policy apparatus, I'd expect Mr Goodhart on t

The Good Judgement Project (for that was its name) is pretty awesome - but if you mechanically connected it to the policy apparatus, I'd expect Mr Goodhart on the next train. You've proposed a few possible countermeasures (play money, publication of bets, a guess at the equilibrium outcome of a vastly complex HFT game). Each of these might work, but (a) isn't actually what Robin Hanson is proposing (b) hasn't been tested as a defence against highly motivated adversarial actors. And they would be motivated. The threat model here is "manipulate this market and directly influence policy in your favour". They say "money in politics is like water - it finds all the cracks", and politics at least has humans in the loop. The track record of people betting against it is...not promising.

Houshalter 9y ago
Please show me how any of the ideas I've proposed can be exploited. I guess in theory all the people involved could be bribed - but that's already true in our current system! At least this distributes the process over many more people and vastly increases the number of people you need to bribe. Let's try something and see what happens. It doesn't need to start with the government, even private businesses implementing these systems would be a great test bed. Then we can work out the flaws, if there are any. The potential benefits of improving our prediction making ability is enormous. This is a problem that, in an ideal world, our society would be devoting tons of resources to solve. The status quo sucks and we shouldn't just give up and accept it.
- XFrequentist 9y ago
  meredydd's specifically voicing concern with decision markets, not prediction markets. Hanson's Futarchy paper outlines the difference (alas, wikipedia unhelpfully treats them as synonyms). Hanson's "Adventure 1" is quite a bit more specific than "improving our prediction making ability" (which of course could unlock tremendous value).

Houshalter 9y ago

Please show me how any of the ideas I've proposed can be exploited. I guess in theory all the people involved could be bribed - but that's already true in our current system! At least this distributes the process over many more people and vastly increases the number of people you need to bribe. Let's try something and see what happens. It doesn't need to start with the government, even private businesses implementing these systems would be a great test bed. Then we can work out the flaws, if there are any. The potential benefits of improving our prediction making ability is enormous. This is a problem that, in an ideal world, our society would be devoting tons of resources to solve. The status quo sucks and we shouldn't just give up and accept it.

XFrequentist 9y ago
meredydd's specifically voicing concern with decision markets, not prediction markets. Hanson's Futarchy paper outlines the difference (alas, wikipedia unhelpfully treats them as synonyms). Hanson's "Adventure 1" is quite a bit more specific than "improving our prediction making ability" (which of course could unlock tremendous value).